How to Build an RSS 2.0 Feed – O’Reilly Media
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Blog
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weird error messages during the DocBook Website compilation batch…
Sometimes you really didn’t change anything crucial, and you find the new error messages just too obscure, then do this:
$ make clean
$ make realclean
And most of the time the error messages ar gone. That worked at least for me. -
“Perl Best Practices” as a useful good night story
“Perl Best Practices” – O’Reilly Media
I really like reading good night stories for my sons late in the evening, but I hate reading “Spiderman fights Hulk“, absolutely. Really!
Now, I actually found out years ago, that it doesn’t really matter to the kids, what you read, but that you like, what you read to them.
Last night I selected a book, which didn’t come into operation then, but with one day delay today it actually did so.
Pls find the title attached! (This referred to, when this article was a Google Buzz and there was even a picture attached. I do love Google Buzz, but the number of followers is rather depressing, I actually prefer not to know, how many usually read my blogs. And last week’s Google presentation of the Buzz API at Berlin.Betahaus.de with finest catering and unlimited free drinks even encouraged me to love it more.)
Now you may understand, what I referred to by: “it doesn’t really matter to the kids…“
You may even think, I am a bad father. I seriously don’t agree. Well, the useless social workers of the “youth welfare office” at Berlin might agree with you. But then, I don’t care.
Son#2 literally slept within minutes, which is otherwise never easy to achieve. (He can easily fought 2 hours against his sleepiness.)
Now this either has to do with the quality of the book, or simply with my son liking my voice. Choose yourself!
Son#2 actually started sleeping deeply in the middle of the preface, but I insisted on completing the preface, of course w/o even touching the acknowledgements. Sorry for that. Maybe I will browse them silently another day. I do find names interesting, and after 30 years in IT you do know a few ones.After that I decided to get the PDF for $5 from O’Reilly’s, and I immediately went for it. That PDF is now on my disk. I even think parts of this book will make good presentation material at future Berlin Technical Perl Meetings, well, maybe Stuttgart Technical Perl Meetings, if the Berlin Perl Mongers are lucky enough resp. not lucky enough. Decide yourself, which way it’s meant!
This book looks like entertaining but educative literature, just the way I considered Larry Wall’ classical Camel Book almost 20 years ago. But I read it then in the Berlin Underground on my way to work or back home.
Pls have mercy and excuse my Bad Simple English!
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“Judaism deals better with sex than Christianity”, says Swedish prof
Interesting article in a way, but then: we are in the 21st century – WTF^H^H^H who cares for Stone Age books and their ancient morals?
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3rd party Facebook applications – use with caution!
Right now there was yet another Internet service with a big Facebook button…
When you press this button, and they ask you in a very tiny print, whether you allow them to pull your friendlist on Facebook, then press Stop without further hesitating! They are simply bad. You don’t want get your friends dragged into your experiments, right? Sometimes they also say: “Let’s find you some friends?” That’s about the same. Don’t! Just don’t! -
learning from others – a temporary home-worker’s experience
I really enjoyed working with my design profession mate yesterday. He brought his MacBook with him, and I also learned from him, what the MacBook substitute for the scroll-wheel is: a two-finger wiping over the touchpad.
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“the right tool for your job”
I thought, I should cross-post / sort of “retweet” this article “the right tool for your job” from the rails to the perl world. Of course, the words are different, and also the tools, but the professional researcher attitude is the same, I think. Maybe someone picks the article up and translates it into the perl world.
I particularly like, what he says in the end:Use what works
Use the best tool for the job, don’t be afraid to look outside your main language or to push outside your comfort levels. Don’t hesitate to make a switch to another plugin or gem if the one you are using doesn’t seem to fit your needs. Most of all, just take some time to really examine what you are using – it can go a long way.According to my experience you can’t share this attitude with most employers or clients, but as a professional researcher software developer I fully agree. -
using SVG for graphics within HTML generated from DocBook Website
I learned the hard way, that SVG graphics must get referenced via EMBED, not via IMG. I do that now.
But still…
I created a “generic logo”. It’s white on a transparent background, the real background determined by the context. That’s the idea. But I found this on the web – now I am confused:How do I set the background color of an SVG image?
Sadly, SVG does not support directly specifying an image background color. With aiSee, however, you can easily work around this drawback by artificially enlarging the layout plane as follows: Open the SVG file with a text editor and manually adjust the four values of the viewBox attribute. This attribute is to be found in the third line of the SVG file.
The idea is to share this logo with the DocBook community. So far all new DocBook Websites are branded NM like Norman Walsh, that’s because he started that software. I asked him for the sources of the logos a couple of days ago, but he couldn’t find them, and they were GIMP XFC anyway, and not scalable as SVG. SVG is the hit IMO. I thought I should mention this: I am using O’Reilly’s SVG Essentials, that’s IMO a great book, and you can read and print it for free on their O’Reilly Commons wiki. -
editing XML documents in emacs using nxml-mode / cont’d
I was suffering for many weeks now with emacs on Snow Leopard, as I had forgotten that nice customizable variable nxml-sexp-element-flag. Setting that one to t (Lisp, yes!!!) really gives XML editing a boost. Now you can “move” forwards and backwards beyond entire tags enclosing huge amounts of text. I had been too lazy digging into that thing the first time, I noticed XML editing on my Snow Leopard MacBook is harder than on my openSUSE Linux ASUS notebook. I do confess that. Being lazy is always bad.